Internal Begins! So let's catch up.

so, we've finally finished cleaning up from our several supervised test periods, and we're shipping off to internal. but for those who haven't heard, we are not doing a full test cycle right now-- internal will be the last test. the purpose here is just to make sure that if we for any reason have to drop the project and release as-is, the main story will at least not be horribly bug ridden for y'all. we'll have another full test cycle again (one that will probably span eons) once postgame is complete.

that said! it's been a minute since i talked about some of our new features and changes. let's start with the thing i've been screaming about. hint: it's AI. 

we've made a number of improvements and fixes to a lot of facets of it, but there's two things in particular that have really just knackered my knickers:

• the first is what we've just started referring to as the 'speed bug'. basically, there was a certain line of code used in default essentials that, when we reworked AI, we reused a lot. it speed like a nice, strapping young line of code, and we had no reason whatsoever to think it might be completely broken. so naturally, it was, and we copied it into 200 places. this caused the AI to basically always think it was faster than the player, even when it definitely was not, which as you might imagine, has caused a lot of issues and a lot of emotional pain. this has now been fixed, unleashing never-before-seen chambers of code into the wild for the first time. that can come with its own issues. basically: aaaaaaa
• the second we just discovered a couple days ago. let's call it the 'switch-reversal bug'. basically, when deciding what pokemon to switch in, the parts of the code that checked type effectiveness got switched around. thus, it has been intentionally sending in pokemon with bad type match ups the entire time. this was an easy fix, but also   
  frankly it's amazing that switching has worked well enough to this point that it wasn't completely obvious
  but.
  here we are.

those are the big bois but like even aside from those i've been fixing dozens of case issues for the last week or two. it's gonna be good.
or i'm gonna cry.

what else! check this out:

by popular demand, we've merged the multi-move mod into the main project! Huge shoutout to @Waynolt for getting this going and letting us adapt it. We've also made some convenience improvements that you can see in the above gif-- Instead of selecting each pokemon through the menu, you can just hold Ctrl when you select them to automatically add them to the multi-move queue.

We've fixed some other misc things too, the fishing animation that's been missing for years, some PULSEs have been buffed, and we found an issue with hidden power where the player's hidden powers weren't actually properly set to the static 60 BP even though we tried to change that before. Very sorry about that, guys :c

One more update for you today. This one comes from our animator Vulpes, and it's exactly what the move deserved:

That's more or less where we're at. So since we're not moving on to later stages of testing, there's no set end date to internal-- we'll just fix stuff as we go and as we work. And thus, internal will simply evaporate into the distance, as must I.